Tag: harvard

“INTELLIGENT LIQUID” CREATED BY HARVARD SCIENTISTS REPRESENTS STRANGE “NEW CLASS OF FLUID”

Harvard researchers say they have developed a programmable metafluid they are calling an ‘intelligent liquid’  that contains tunable springiness, adjustable optical properties, variable viscosity, and even the seemingly magical ability to shift between a Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid.

The team’s exact formula is still a secret as they explore potential commercial applications. However, the researchers believe their intelligent liquid could be used in anything from programmable robots to intelligent shock absorbers or even optical devices that can shift between transparent and opaque states.

“We are just scratching the surface of what is possible with this new class of fluid,” said Adel Djellouli, a Research Associate in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the first author of the paper. “With this one platform, you could do so many different things in so many different fields.”

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Harvard scrubs ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ film info from website

Harvard Law School scrubbed its website of an event page advertising a screening of the film “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” amid concerns about endorsing violence.

Internet archives show the event page was removed sometime between Friday and Tuesday when The College Fix noticed it was gone. A post advertising the screening on Harvard’s Systemic Justice Project website also was removed prior to the event.

“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is a fictional story about climate activists who blow up a section of pipe in Texas, according to the film’s website.

The trailer opens with a man building a homemade explosive and ends with police arriving at the site of a pipeline that has been blown up. The characters call the bombing “justified” and “an act of self-defense.”

It is unclear if the Wednesday evening screening was canceled, rescheduled, or still took place.  The Fix contacted the HLS Film Society, communications office, and event moderator Professor Jon Hanson by email and phone Tuesday asking if the event had been canceled. None replied.

The Fix also reached out to the film society, Hanson, and the communications office March 28 with questions regarding the concerns about the film endorsing violence and university organizers’ stance on peaceful advocacy.

The film screening drew criticism online in recent weeks, including concerns that Harvard may be supporting violent activism. Critics include U.S. Rep. Mike Bost, an Illinois Republican, who said in a March 28 post on X that violent acts like those portrayed in the film are the reason he supports harsher penalties for eco-terrorism.

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Harvard University removes human skin binding from book

Harvard University has removed the binding of human skin from a 19th Century book kept in its library.

Des Destinées de l’Ame (Destinies of the Soul) has been housed at Houghton Library since the 1930s.

In 2014, scientists determined that the material it was bound with was in fact human skin.

But the university has now announced it has removed the binding “due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history”.

Des Destinées de l’Ame is a meditation on the soul and life after death, written by Arsène Houssaye in the mid-1880s.

He is said to have given it to his friend, Dr Ludovic Bouland, a doctor, who then reportedly bound the book with skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient who had died of natural causes.

Harvard University explained its decision to remove the binding, saying: “After careful study, stakeholder engagement, and consideration, Harvard Library and the Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee concluded that the human remains used in the book’s binding no longer belong in the Harvard Library collections, due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history.”

It added it was looking at ways to ensure “the human remains will be given a respectful disposition that seeks to restore dignity to the woman whose skin was used”.

The library is also “conducting additional biographical and provenance research into the anonymous female patient”, the university said.

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Harvard Tramples the Truth

I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.

On March 10, 2020, before any government prompting, Harvard declared that it would “suspend in-person classes and shift to online learning.” Across the country, universities, schools, and state governments followed Harvard’s lead.

Yet it was clear, from early 2020, that the virus would eventually spread across the globe, and that it would be futile to try to suppress it with lockdowns. It was also clear that lockdowns would inflict enormous collateral damage, not only on education but also on public health, including treatment for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health. We will be dealing with the harm done for decades. Our children, the elderly, the middle class, the working class, and the poor around the world—all will suffer.

Schools closed in many other countries, too, but under heavy international criticism, Sweden kept its schools and daycares open for its 1.8 million children, ages one to 15. Why? While anyone can get infected, we have known since early 2020 that more than a thousandfold difference in Covid mortality risk holds between the young and the old. Children faced minuscule risk from Covid, and interrupting their education would disadvantage them for life, especially those whose families could not afford private schools, pod schools, or tutors, or to homeschool.

What were the results during the spring of 2020? With schools open, Sweden had zero Covid deaths in the one-to-15 age group, while teachers had the same mortality as the average of other professions. Based on those facts, summarized in a July 7, 2020, report by the Swedish Public Health Agency, all U.S. schools should have quickly reopened. Not doing so led to “startling evidence on learning loss” in the United States, especially among lower- and middle-class children, an effect not seen in Sweden.

Sweden was the only major Western country that rejected school closures and other lockdowns in favor of concentrating on the elderly, and the final verdict is now in. Led by an intelligent social democrat prime minister (a welder), Sweden had the lowest excess mortality among major European countries during the pandemic, and less than half that of the United States. Sweden’s Covid deaths were below average, and it avoided collateral mortality caused by lockdowns.

Yet on July 29, 2020, the Harvard-edited New England Journal of Medicine published an article by two Harvard professors on whether primary schools should reopen, without even mentioning Sweden. It was like ignoring the placebo control group when evaluating a new pharmaceutical drug. That’s not the path to truth.

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DEI Disaster: Harvard Plagiarism Scandal Deepens with Allegations Against Diversity Administrator

Harvard’s plagiarism problem continues as the spotlight shines on other faculty members at the Ivy League university in the wake of the school’s former president, Claudine Gay, being ousted amid dozens of plagiarism allegations being unearthed and multiple antisemitism scandals.

Plagiarism allegations against Harvard Extension School DEI administrator Shirley Greene involving more than 40 passages of her 2008 dissertation have been filed with the Ivy League institution, according to a report by City Journal.

This comes after disgraced president Claudine Gay resigned earlier this year in the wake of a slew of plagiarism allegations that resulted in her having to make seven corrections across two articles and her Ph.D. dissertation.

Moreover, Harvard University Chief Diversity Officer Sherri Ann Charleston was also accused of plagiarism in a new complaint, which alleges that Charleston claimed credit for her husband’s work.

Additionally, top cancer researchers at Harvard have been recently accused of scientific fraud affecting 37 studies. The researchers are also accused of manipulating data images with simple methods such as copy-and-paste and Adobe Photoshop.

As for the latest allegations against Greene, who is a Title IX coordinator affiliated with the Office for Gender Equity, she has worked to advance the concept of so-called “Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.”

The full complaint, obtained by City Journal, raises serious questions about Greene’s scholarship and academic integrity.

In one instance, Greene appears to take words, phrases, passages, and almost entire paragraphs verbatim directly from academic Janelle Lee Woo’s 2004 dissertation, “Chinese American Female Identity,” without including appropriate attribution or quotation.

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Harvard Study Finds ‘Fact Checkers’ Overwhelmingly Hold Left-Wing Views

A new Harvard study that will shock the world has found that misinformation ‘fact checkers’ overwhelmingly hold left-wing political views.

Who could have seen this one coming?

Data from Harvard Misinformation Review shows that out of 150 “misinformation experts,” only 5 per cent lean “slightly right” in their political opinions.

10 per cent are centrists and the other 85 per cent lean slightly left, left-wing, or far-left.

The study also explains the blindingly obvious fact that individuals with left-wing beliefs won’t be able to spot left-wing misinformation because they’ll either ignore it or actively like it.

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Harvard Scientist Presents New Evidence That Samples Are Alien Spacecraft

Harvard professor and notorious UFO hunter Avi Loeb claims he has new evidence that meteor fragments recovered from the ocean floor are alien technology, Boston Public Radio reports, pushing back against detractors who argue their origins are more mundane.

“It raises the possibility that it may have been a Voyager-like meteor, artificially made by another civilization,” Loeb told the station on Monday, referencing an actual pair of probes sent screaming out of the solar system by NASA back in the 1970s.

Though perhaps best known for his provocative theories on the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua that passed through our solar system back in 2017, Loeb’s latest findings concern another interstellar oddity which, unlike Oumuamua, found its way to Earth — albeit not in one piece.

Dubbed IM1, the meteor plunged into the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea nearly a decade ago, but was overlooked until Loeb spearheaded efforts that confirmed in 2022 that it was the first interstellar object known to fall to Earth.

In hot pursuit, the astrophysicist launched an expedition to comb the ocean floor for the object last year and found, he claims, its remnants in the form of spherical metal fragments, or “spherules,” that he thinks could suggest IM1 might be some form of alien technology.

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Harvard University Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Hit With 40 Credible Plagiarism Accusations in Brand New Scandal for College – Allegedly Stole the Work of Nearly a Dozen Scholars Including Her Own Husband

Harvard University has been handed another black eye after former Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned in disgrace earlier this month.

As the Gateway Pundit previously reported, Gay refused to condemn calling the “genocide of Jews” hate speech in testimony before Congress last month. Evidence then emerged she committed academic misconduct by plagiarizing her PhD thesis.

Now, the Washington Free Beacon reports that Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, was hit with an anonymous complaint Monday accusing her of extensively plagiarizing her academic work. This includes lifting large portions of text without quotation marks and taking credit for a study by another scholar — her own husband.

The complaint lists a total of 40 accusations against Charleston going back to 2009, a decade before she joined Harvard.

The Free Beacon conducted its own independent study of the complaint and revealed Charleston quoted or paraphrased nearly a dozen scholars without giving them credit in her 2009 dissertation at the University of Michigan.

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PERCEPTION OF TIME CAN DRAMATICALLY ALTER THIS CRUCIAL BIOLOGICAL PROCESS, NEW STUDY REVEALS

New research from Harvard University shows that a person’s perception of time can directly affect how fast wounds heal.

Previous studies have hinted at a link between the mind and body, particularly in relation to stress and lifestyle. However, this study is the first to show a direct connection between the perception of time and the seemingly autonomous process of healing, opening up the possibility of incorporating time perception into the treatment of injury.

HEALING AND HUMAN PERCEPTION OF TIME

Published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, the study conducted by Harvard psychologists Peter Aungle and Ellen Langer aimed to determine if the rate of healing was independent of the psychology of the patient or if their perceptions could accelerate or decelerate the healing process.

“Based on the theory of mind–body unity—which posits simultaneous and bidirectional influences of mind on body and body on mind—we hypothesized that wounds would heal faster or slower when perceived time was manipulated to be experienced as longer or shorter respectively,” the researches behind the finding write.

As noted, previous work had found connections between recovery from injury and stress levels, with higher levels of stress potentially interrupting a healthy recovery from injury, but those connections were thought to be primarily physiological in nature.

The researchers also note that previous work studying psychological influences on chronic pain, emotion, and physiological health, and even placebo effects, particularly those involving administration of inert medications, “have led to meaningful improvements in treatments for a broad range of illnesses and injuries.”

Still, this latest study is the first to look at the mindset of the individual, specifically their perception of the passage of time, in relation to recovery rates.

“We hypothesized that experimentally induced wounds would heal faster when more perceived time had passed and heal slower when less perceived time had passed,” the researchers explain, “despite no differences in actual elapsed time.”

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Harvard’s president Claudine Gay faces 40 new allegations of plagiarism: Latest claims refer to seven publications she’s written and include ‘entire paragraphs lifted from other sources’

Embattled Harvard president Claudine Gay has been hit with fresh allegations of plagiarism, with claims that she lifted ‘entire paragraphs’ in her academic writing – but the Ivy League says it’s still backing her. 

The new allegations were first published in a shocking report from the Washington Free Beacon and span seven publications authored by Gay over 30 years, ranging from missing quotation marks around a few phrases or sentences to entire paragraphs lifted verbatim. Gay is now accused of plagiarizing about half of the 11 journal articles on her resume.

The academic initially submitted two corrections to papers from 2001 and 2017 after she was accused of plagiarism, adding ‘quotation marks and citations,’ a Harvard spokesman said.  However, after additional claims of plagiarism, the Ivy League then said on Wednesday that Gay would also update three spots in her Ph.D. dissertation to add attributions.

It comes as the House Committee on Education and the Workforce announced that it’s widening the scope of it’ probe into Gay’s work, and demanded the school hand over all documentation related to the plagiarism allegations. The committee had already opened a probe into antisemitism at the Harvard campus following Gay’s testimony that was heavily criticized. 

‘Our concern is that standards are not being applied consistently, resulting in different rules for different members of the academic community,’ said Republican rep. Virginia Foxx, the committee’s chair.

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